How I Discovered that I Had Received a Pay Raise by Checking my 401k

So, I realized today that I received a pay raise at the end of April last year. Last year.A year ago.
What the heck?! I thought I was so on top of my finances!

I was looking at my 401K contributions and noticed that it has been $1.20 higher per week for quite some time. Which, whatever – it’s a dollar, but I didn’t understand why the math wasn’t right. Four percent of my $53,664.00 salary is $41.28 per week, not $42.48. Working some backwards math, I found that $42.48 is four percent of $55,224.00, and the difference in salaries comes down to $0.75 per week.

Bingo.

At the end of April, my employer’s CEO sent a letter stating that “Effective April 28, 2016 we are increasing every employees hourly pay rate by $0.75 per hour.” I did not believe this applied to me since I’m not an hourly employee.
I did notice that my paycheck increased about $10.00 per week around this time, but my husband and I had adjusted our tax withholding amount right after our wedding (April 16), so I thought the increase was because of this.

Those monthly snapshots I’ve been posting every month? Wrong. All of them, wrong.

So, I’m excited to have received a pay raise, even if it was a year ago! Yay me! I guess this goes to show that even we “nerds” don’t have it completely together!

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Hi there!

I’m Ellie, and my husband and I became completely debt free when we paid off our mortgage on January 29, 2018. Follow our new journey of saving $100,000 in two years to purchase our first rental property in cash while cash-flowing smaller goals along the way!